May we all have the support we need to lessen our isolation within ourselves and with others and to deepen in our human connections. We are all related. - Molly
Excerpted from this interview with Johann Hari and Naomi Klein:
It’s now a hundred years since drugs were first banned. And four years ago, nearly four years ago, when I started writing the book, I realized we were coming up to the centenary, and I wanted to think about this for quite a personal reason. One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to, and there was a lot of addiction in my family. And I kind of realized that there were loads of really basic questions that I just didn’t know the answer to about this subject. Why did we start kind of going to war against drug users and addicts in the first place? Why do we continue, even though a lot of people think it doesn’t work? What really causes drug use and drug addiction? And what are the alternatives? And so, I didn’t want to do that. I thought part of the problem with this whole debate is we talk about it in such an abstract way, you know? Like we talk like we’re at a philosophy seminar, and we talk about how the world should be. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to talk about real people whose lives were changed one way or another.
So I ended up going on this kind of big journey across nine different countries and meeting a really fascinating range of people, from a transsexual crack dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a scientist who spends a lot of time feeding hallucinogens to mongooses to see if they like them—they do, but only in very specific circumstances—and to the only country that’s ever decriminalized all drugs, from cannabis to crack, with really striking results. And the book is really the story of how I discovered that almost everything we think we know about this subject is wrong. Drugs are not what we think they are. Addiction is not what we think it is. The drug war is certainly not what we’ve been told it is. And the alternatives aren’t what we think they are...
So, I think this has—Bruce taught us about how this has huge implications, obviously, for the drug war. The drug war is based on the idea that the chemicals cause the addiction, and we need to physically eradicate these chemicals from the face of the Earth. If in fact it’s not the chemicals, if in fact it’s isolation and pain that cause the addiction, then it suddenly throws into sharp contrast the idea that we need to impose more isolation and pain on addicts in order to make them stop, which is what we currently do.
But it actually has much deeper implications that I think really relate to what Naomi writes about in This Changes Everything, and indeed before. We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.
Please go here for the full interview: https://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/11/johann_hari_naomi_klein_does_capitalism
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